BYOB

In London in the seventies it was common to see BYOB emblazoned on restaurant windows...

Took me a while to figure out what it meant, as restaurants were then well outside of my budget. It means Bring Your Own Bottle, the idea being that you purchased your own cheap bottle of wine in a supermarket and bought it to the restaurant, which opened it for you (and charged a small “corkage” fee for doing so). Nice to see that the idea is now coming back again into vogue here in Dublin.

In lots of businesses and universities a new mnemonic is also on the rise – BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. The idea being that the employee/student can bring their own preferred computing device to work or college and expect to have it supported by the business/university networks and applications.

There was a time when the business/university IT department would have been horrified by the idea. Indeed IT departments would often mandate a particular make of “supported” hardware, and insist on the use of an out-of-date, but “supported”, operating system. Often a deal would be done with a particular manufacturer to supply the approved equipment at a nice price.

But why shouldn’t the employee/student make their own choice as regards their own individual preference for a particular device? After all they feel comfortable with it, it suits them, why change? Rather than the individual conforming to the restrictions imposed by the IT department, surely the IT department should move to support the individual?

Now there are good and valid reasons for IT departments to be concerned, primarily about security. However gradually they are adapting to the idea, in part because users are voting with their feet. In our labs, filled with identikit PCs fixed to the desks, it is common to see a student stubbornly insisting on using their own personal laptop wedged between the PCs. Project work is often developed and demonstrated on a personal device rather than the standard PC provided.

However with freedom comes responsibility. So the most important advice is, yes, by all means BYOD, but also BYOB (Bring Your Own Brain!)

The Cost of Education

Actually it can be quite cheap.

A couple of years ago I took a summer sabbatical in Malawi, in Africa. A very poor country, where everything has to be done on the cheap. I recall watching a class of maybe 100 toddlers, sitting on the ground in the shade of a Baobab tree, listening to a teacher standing on a box. I guess that’s the same way it was done hundreds of years ago. As the sun moved, children on the edge of the group quietly moved around the other side to stay in the shade. One thing that was there in abundance was an eagerness to learn.

I then visited a secondary school where they did have buildings, but only a few broken down desks. Again mostly the students sat on the floor. The blackboard was so worn only a small corner of it was still usable. I recall a conversation with an Australian accountant who was responsible for checking the expenditure of €150,000 Euro worth of Irish Government aid. I remember him reeling off the list of what that money bought – three new fully fitted school buildings, eight teacher’s houses, 20 outdoor toilets, 100s of desks – the list went on and on. We are not used to that kind of value-for-money here at home, but in terms of life-changing potential that money went a very long way. Here in Ireland €150,000 wouldn’t even make a decent banker’s bonus.

Anyway, I digress. My point is that here in the first world we actually don’t do teaching much differently. Teaching a subject like mathematics still comes down to a teacher standing in front of, and talking to, a classroom full of students. We have all sorts of technical aids, but in fact they are rarely used. I still use chalk and a blackboard, as do most of my colleagues. At the end of the course I set an exam, I collect hand-written scripts, and I mark them with a red pen. Could I do the same under a Baobab tree, or in a class where the students sat on the floor and the blackboard was only partially usable? Well yes I probably could just about manage.

So why don’t we use advanced technology more in our teaching? And if we don’t, why is education so expensive here?

One problem with technology is that you can’t always trust it to work. Chalk and a blackboard always works. Connecting a laptop to an overhead projector never seems to be straightforward. Why is that? Once I recall going to give a lecture in DCU, and looking up to where the projector was, only to see a hole in the roof where the projector should have been. It had been stolen the night before. Sometimes technology actually takes us on a major step backwards. PowerPoint. I rest my case.

So all we have done is to take the ancient teacher-in-front-of-a-class model and surround it with layers of bureaucracy and some ill-fitting technology which arguably doesn’t add much value to the process. Perhaps if we were to strip it back to the basics and then carefully build it back up again we might end up with a much better value-for-money education system. And the way things are going, maybe that’s exactly what we will have to do.